Shuga Lumpkin
Personality Cynical on the outside but somewhere within still a romantic, Shuga is a man made giant. He's far from gentle, though, as evidenced by his tough exterior and almost off-putting size. Coupled with a gritty, grumpy demeanor, it has become his trademark to be as much the stereotype of a heavy-hitting, hard leather wearing biker with no care in the world but the open road and rock 'n' roll. Simply put, he doesn't take shit from anybody and makes sure that they know it. Lately, he's been feeling the weight of a certain burden upon him. With the burden to perform some service somewhere, and no readily viable outlet, the man takes to the streets on his quest for the mysterious higher purpose of finding someone or something to do with his capabilities, either perhaps to lead them or to simply be a part of a greater organization. But, wildly romantic ideas of having an entourage are shoved to the back of his mind at the banality felt about him in the real world. His human interactions have been for the most part rough and gruff, and show no signs of changing. They always said trolls resembled the rocks of the mountains they dwelt in, and for Shuga this doesn’t seem to be any different in his stubborn ways. Sheet Attributes : Glamour: 4, Banality: 5, Willpower: 5 ::* Ravaging Threshold: Shuga's Threshold involves experiencing the drunken revelry of humans. Sometimes that drunken revelry comes in the form of a flat out bar brawl. At the end of the day, there's nothing like a good celebration of life and being alive... by beating the crap out of one another on a bucketful of beer. : Strength: 5, Dexterity: 3, Stamina: 3 ::* Specialty: Sustained Carrying : Charisma: 2, Manipulation: 2, Appearance: 2 : Perception: 2, Intelligence: 2, Wits: 4 ::* Specialty: Survival Abilities : Talents: Athletics 1, Brawl 4, Dodge 1, Integrity 1, Intimidation 4, Primal Urge 2, Resistance 4, Scrounging 1, Streetwise 3 ::* Specialty: Brawl (Dirty Fighting), Intimidation (Physical Threats), Resistance (Moving While Encumbered) : Skills: Animal Ken 1, Crafts 2, Drive 2, Leadership 3, Marksmanship 1, Melee 2, Survival 1, Technology 3 ::* Expertise: Crafts (Metalworking), Drive (Motorcycles), Technology (Repairing Transport Devices) : Knowledges: Culture 1, Lore 2, Military Tactics 1, Occult 1 ::* Expertise: Culture (Bikers, Drive-Ins and Dives), Lore (Changeling) Advantages/Tempers : Backgrounds: Contacts 1, Equipment 3, Experience 2, Mentor 2, Treasures 1 ::* Treasure: Musical Tune-playing Lockbox Amulet (Chicanery I/Fuddle) ::* Mentor: Wrenchmouth Mary (Grump Unseelie Nocker, Fatalist Legacy) ::* Equipment: Custom made Chopper Motorcycle Arts & Realms : Arts: Primal 1, Sovereign 1, Wayfare 2 : Realms: Actor 2, Fae 1, Nature 1, Prop 1, Scene 2 Merits & Flaws Merits : Common Sense (1), Danger Sense (2), Huge Size (4) Flaws : Intolerance: Turncoats (1), Geas: Cat Care (1), Sadism (2) Freebies :Experience 2 -- 45 Freebies :Dexterity 2 to 3 - 5 freebies :Brawl 3 to 4, Integrity 0 to 1, Intimidation 3 to 4, Primal Urge 0 to 2, Resistance 2 to 4 - 14 freebies :Animal Ken 0 to 1, Crafts 1 to 2, Leadership 0 to 3, Survival 0 to 1 - 12 freebies :Wayfare Art 1 to 2, Actor Realm 1 to 2, Scene Realm 1 to 2 - 11 freebies :Common Sense 1, Danger Sense 2, Huge Size 4 - 7 freebies :Intolerance, Geas, Sadism - +4 freebies Advancement Advancement History * Glamour 3 to 4: 10/31/09. From Self. Slot 1. Approved by: Puck :: Shuga gets back to basics of being Fae and visiting the freeholds in the area more. Culminated with Samhain. * Scrounging 0 to 1: 3/28/10. From Self. Slot 1. Approved by: Puck :: Shuga has had to dig around for what he needs to survive in the urban environs. It's nothing new. Most of the time it involves having to do a few odd jobs or favors in exchange for what he needs to get. Info, cash, parts for his bike... he's learning this the hard, solo way. Specialties & Expertise Attributes : Strength: Sustained Carrying - The long hours of working in Wrenchmouth Mary's shop, carrying all of her heavy materials, honed his strength into this focus. He's like a plowhorse, pulling his weight in the most literal fashion and often for long periods of time. : Wits: Survival - Much of life on the street is like the law of the jungle. For Shuga, he's learned to react quickly to potentially bad situations that involve threats to his personal survival. He has to, especially when he usually doesn't really notice them until the very last second. Abilities : Brawl: Dirty Fighting - In a fight for one's survival, you fight to win. Because losing often means death. Or worse. : Intimidation: Physical Threats - Everyone thinks they're pretty tough until you bring out the knife. Or threaten to tear their arms off. : Resistance: Moving While Encumbered - Going hand in hand with his strength specialty, carrying bulky or maneuvering around shop full of junky odds and ends while doing so. : Crafts: Metalworking - Wrenchmouth Mary taught him. In his case, he picked up metalworking to sustain his further understanding of how to work with metal as a building material. On his better days, he could turn scrap metal into art. : Drive: Motorcycles - Shuga drives motorcycles mainly. He's had some training with cars but definitely prefers the bikes. : Technology: Repairing Transport Devices - Having built and maintained his own custom chopper helps. He spent a long while learning from Wrenchmouth Mary, and is still learning how to tinker with things that go vroom and zoom. : Culture: Bikers, Drive-Ins and Dives - Having spent much of his time in the biker gangs, he's mostly familiar (and comfortable) with the settings of the rough and tumble crowds in dives and biker bars. : Lore: Changeling - He's had run-ins with other Kithain, and through them learned a few things about Changelings and how they tick. Backgrounds : Contacts - Shuga's contacts are what residual buddies he has in the underworld network of gangs and probably a prison inmate or two. They and he don't keep in touch exactly, and he probably only calls upon them once in a blue moon. : Equipment - His custom hand made chopper that's one of a kind and while not replacable, certainly fixable. He also has armored riding leathers that could double as possible body armor. : Mentor - Wrenchmouth Mary is a Grump. She's an Unseelie Nocker who lives near Detroit (go figure), of Fatalist Unseelie Legacy and Crafter Seelie Legacy. She goes through her periods of highs (in which she goes on a total building spree) to lows (she hates everything that she's ever made, EVER). Having dealt with Mary for at least a year, that accomplishment in and of itself is enough to have earned Shuga a place in Mary's mind. : Treasures - Musical Lockbox Amulet (Chicanery I/Fuddle). This amulet has a bit of a mystical property in that when it's wound (via a small key able to be stored in the locking compartment), the songs it plays are never the same. They could be very similar, as all the tunes have a catchy plinking melody, but its oddest quality is the power to not play the same tune twice. The locking mechanism of the lockbox portion of the amulet is expertly made. The inner compartment of the amulet can hold a small folded up note, pills, powders, and other small trinkets. Merits & Flaws : Common Sense - Most people lack it. Shuga does not. He prides himself on being pragmatic about everything he does. Practicality applies much more to him, if only because wasting energy to figure out impractical methods of solving problems annoys him greatly. : Danger Sense - After being on the streets for so long (an equivalent of two decades or so) he has developed a sense for when things are about to go sour and threaten him. : Huge Size - He was born big and so much of his life is lead by his size and strength now. : Intolerance: Turncoats - Having experienced such heavy shame and embarrassment at his own judged betrayal by his peers in the biker gang, Shuga cannot abide those who would remind him of his past. : Geas: Cats - Shuga may never harm felines. As a side effect, he loves (yes, loves) cats and will help strays to as great an extent as possible. He may even go so far as to aid those who also care for cats. Perhaps this had been a geas put upon him long ago before he was even in existence, but that is how he feels. : Sadism - Having spent almost half his life operating on the hard streets under cruel, unforgiving bosses, he learned to take out his frustrations of unfulfilled dissatisfaction on his victims. And, in some small way, also learned to enjoy it a little too much. History There's always something a little different about him. And I'm not talking about his looks. From the time he was born when he was the eleven-pound baby among five-pounders ‘til even now at the ripe age of 36 and counting, Shuga had been set apart from his mates. The child was a brute only in the physical sense, growing tall and wide like an oak tree from an acorn. If the acorn was believing itself to be a coconut, that is. His parents had met at the North Shore, on the big island of Hawai'i, Oahu. The two of them were surfers and at the time, both already involved in other relationships. They were there for the surf competition, but as one thing lead to another, Biggie Brown and Su-Zin Ah Kuoi, were in love for those few weeks. They exchanged phone numbers and bodily fluids, but what it also resulted in was a babe named Shuga Brown. Was he teased about his name in school? He might have been, but the instances were awfully few. Shuga wasn't much for talking, and he struggled with his teachers and kids in turn as he waded through the social discomforts of regular schooling. He wasn't mentally slow; they simply assumed because of his size and quiet demeanor that he wasn't picking up things. In truth, when put on the spot, Shuga rose to the challenges presented him. His grades reflected a decent amount of learning but never anything stellar. It was, quite predictably, in the realms of sports that he excelled. Everyone expected him to be the defensive line, and he was. Everyone expected him to be a "dumb jerk of a jock", but he wasn't. And that was why sometimes he'd get the girls. But none of them were very interesting at all. Biggie Brown passed away from a heart attack when Shuga was seventeen, leaving him and his mother on the mainland to figure out where to go next. Su-Zin had always been good to her son but the death of her love brought a depression to her heart that she couldn't shake. Shuga's presence reminded her of Biggie and this he came to realize, and it in turn drove Shuga away from the house and out into the streets in an attempt to spare his mother the pain of memory. Things were not well with the youth either. Those around him saw a marked change as he fell out of academia and into the streets. He got into the gangs and the drugs. He also saw the goals of the leaders and how they were enacted, and stirred within as they made their hard decisions look easy. Shuga unknowingly clung to the structure provided by the gangs; often, they harbored a code of respect. Try as he wanted to fit in, though, Shuga continued to feel inwardly that he was missing something. He clawed his way up through ranks with brute force and at times cruelty, but never could he bring himself to sweep aside his leaders until he could stand their faulty logic no more. By the time Shuga was nineteen, he was his own fearsome and respected force with a small but loyal following. And still it wasn't enough. He continued to feel like he needed something more, a higher purpose calling to him through a mist through which only his dreams seemed to be able to pierce with the roars of beasts and echoing rumbles of mountain caves stirring with something deep in their holds. Something he couldn't quite reach, still. When he finally reached his chrysalis, it was as much a shock to him as it was to the drunken patrons of the local dive. By then, Shuga had graduated out of his pitifully smaller gang which had in turn been swallowed up by the world of biker gangs. Sure, he had been a leader of a gang previously but now that he was back down in the ranks he didn't mind it as much; the inward itch that he needed the challenge of climbing that social mountain again was his drive towards seeking satisfaction in an increasingly dull world. He threw himself into the workings of the gang and even though he didn't speak much at all, everyone knew Shuga Brown as a man to be reckoned with and brought him along on their enforcement duties. He was on his way to earning his patches when the world as he knew it suddenly shifted its axis entirely. The dive was typical, but beneath its surface lay a world that was rife with underhanded scheming and back lot deals, secret words passing from the lips of bearded and mustached men to each other from around foamy heads of beer, and underneath the leather and chrome was the black matte metal of guns. Shuga had none of his own, having lost his recently in a bet with one of his "colleagues". When he stepped into the bar after his underbosses, he first felt the shift. He'd never been nervous about these events before, but that night's was more than a little different. It was like his senses had decided to increase their sharpness, and yet inside under the neon glow all was blurred. The shadows played out like hands reaching for him and his comrades and the bar patrons wore their hard riding leathers like armor, their patches displayed like flags of knighthood. Then, he felt like he was being bent all around – Superman to a steel pipe. Even so, the operation continued, fists flew and eventually those guns were drawn. Chaos erupted all around him not just in the firefight, fleeing patrons and opposing gang's members, but roiling within Shuga was the urge to bring all that he had been dreaming of in epic battles and Shuga was everywhere at once, it seemed like, plowing his way through his foes and (some might say) roaring out of his normally quiet shell in a display of sheer physical aptitude that defied human standards. Yet for the man, he couldn't have felt more alive as everything moved around him in a blur of action. He saw visions of terrible things but didn't feel terrified. He saw them as his goal, a chance to prove himself a match. While he battled away, the others around him served to clear away the rest of the mess that stood in his way. He could have basked in that feeling forever... but his illusions came to a head at the end of a smoking gun as the end of a shotgun wielded by a peculiar looking woman in a mechanical racket of an armor-like suit smashed him to the ground. Shuga woke to a bed too small for him and aching greatly, but hungering more. This was the freehold of the Unseelie Nocker, Wrenchmouth Mary. She was an irritable cuss, and he, her foster. They were only together for a short period of a couple of years, and the two of them got on each other's nerves so often it was amazing that either of them got anything done. Still, Mary taught Shuga much of their roles and while he picked up all the heavy equipment for her when she was working in her shop, he also picked up the habit of tinkering with machines and metalworking. And her mouth. And her nigh-fatalistic view of the world. It was when he finally achieved enough knowledge to build his own motorcycle, and when he had had enough of her constant bickering that could only be silenced by giving her something new to challenge her tinkering ways with, Shuga left Wrenchmouth Mary's shop to set out on his own. He'd left her a special memento piece of their first meeting worked into an odd mesh of steampunk welding – a nuts and bolts cat made from the metal from the shotgun he had been clocked over the head with. She left him a peculiar amulet on a thick chain that, when wound with a tiny key, would play a musical box rendition of a surprisingly catchy, optimistic tune within – and somehow sound different every time. What Shuga would discover later was the secret compartment also in the amulet which held a note written to him from his mentor, of her nostalgia that she would no doubt feel when he was no longer around. It also had directions for him in case he would ever wish to find her again. Shuga was a Grump, as the Kithain would call him now. He changed later in his human life than most of the others he would encounter on his solo journey. It took him some time to get used to the discrepancy between the mundane and that which wasn't; by the time he returned to the biker gang he'd been a part of before, he had definitely changed. They had their mixed feelings and treated him with much suspicion, even though Shuga was on the whole doing the same things he had done with them. It really was different this time though, as he felt his difference more markedly amongst his former peers. Unlike before, when Shuga would wait about for a given mission, this time he pursued with much more purpose towards the upper echelons of his gang. The others grew uncomfortable still, intimidated by his size and presence, and more, the wicked confidence that he had. Ambition, especially that uncontrolled, would be a downfall for the prideful Shuga. It would also be a wakeup call. He'd earned his patches in the gang, but now there were politics to think of for others within the gang with the same ambition. Even though Shuga was well on his way to becoming a fairly competent underboss, his comrades weren't so confident about his stability or they questioned his motivations. Was he trying to become an underboss as a stepping stone to taking over the gang? Was he truly the right guy for managing a portion of the group? Like wary war generals eyeing the rising star, the others watched Shuga as he often went off on his own to who knows where. Shuga tended to his Kithain roles as a fledgling, and eventually he had to disappear for a longer period in which he was to finally encounter a freehold that would have him undergo his Saining. Shuga Lumpkin, a corruption of his true name as spoken by the hissed tongues of Sluagh and cackling laughter of Pooka and other Unseelie in their amusement, returned to his biker gang buddies all frowning at him. It turned out that his absence was duly noted, especially when mission orders came and they'd left without him. Their numbers, though they had not suffered great harm, significantly felt Shuga had committed a cardinal sin of abandonment in a time of need and they judged him for it. However they had meant it to be a severe punishment, for Shuga it was even worse as he realized he had left his oath-sworn brethren, even though they were human. If he was to be a leader, he should never have abandoned those that could have supported him. The Frailty of the troll took hold upon him as they appropriated the punishment, each member taking a turn at kicking and beating him until they drove him out of the gang. Shuga fled their ranks and hid in exile. No longer could he fool himself into thinking he could straddle both worlds, which was what Shuga had been doing. He threw himself into a self-imposed study of who he would be. Truly. His very nature demanded that he hone himself to be better, if for nobody else around him, then for anyone who he encountered. He travelled all throughout the land, searching for other Kithain and learning when he could. But for all his slow progression, he still found himself alone without a place to settle. The latest place his solitary path has taken him is Crystal Springs, Colorado. It was a place that he'd passed plenty of times before on the map, but this time… this time he took the turn off on the interstate and started in to see what and who he could find here, and whether or not he'd choose to stay a while. Etc Can you smell what the app is cookin'?! ...nevermind... Category:Past PCs